AN ELECTRONIC LIBRARY BASED ON HYPER‐BOOKS: THE HYPER‐LIB PROJECT

Over the last few decades, technological development has had a major impact on libraries. Nowadays many libraries use electronic support for operations such as acquiring and cataloguing material, searching, and retrieval. Information technology is an aid for both the librarian, in order to organise the material, and for the user in order to gain access to the broad storehouse. Information is still physically stored in the library. This represents an intermediate step in the process of library automation which leads to a completely electronic library, where a timely provision of selected materials to individuals, when and where they need them, is guaranteed. An electronic library houses different kinds of electronic information: in addition to text, there is an extensive use of multimedia collections, such as sound archives, video material, slide collections and so on. The electronic library is the result of complex changes which have affected and which still affect the publishing world (Barker 1994; Clement 1994; Raitt 1993).